Vladimir Bukovsky

Early life

Vladimir Bukovsky was born to Russian parents in the town of Belebey in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (today the Republic of Bashkortostan in the Russian Federation), to which his family was evacuated during World War II. After the war he and his parents returned to Moscow where his father Konstantin (1908–1976) was a well-known Soviet journalist. During his last year at school Vladimir was expelled for creating and editing an unauthorised magazine. To meet the requirements to apply for a university place he completed his secondary education at evening classes. Bukovsky was enrolled at biology department of Moscow State University, but he was expelled at age 19 for criticizing Soviet state organizations, such as Komsomol.

Soviet era

Rallies

In September 1960, Bukovsky entered Moscow University to study biology. There he and some friends decided to revive the informal Mayakovsky Square poetry readings which began after a statue to the poet was unveiled in central Moscow in 1958. They made contact with earlier participants of the readings such as Vladimir Osipov, the editor of Boomerang (1960), and Yuri Galanskov who issued the Phoenix (1961), two examples of literary samizdat.

It was then that the 19-year-old Bukovsky wrote his critical notes on the Communist Youth League or Komsomol. Later, this text was given the title "Theses on the Collapse of the Komsomol" by the KGB. Bukovsky portrayed the USSR as an "illegal society" facing an acute ideological crisis. The Komsomol was "moribund", he asserted, having lost both moral and spiritual authority, and he called for its democratisation. This text, and his other activities, brought Bukovsky to the attention of the authorities. He was interrogated twice before being thrown out of the university in autumn 1961.

Bukovsky was arrested on 1 June 1963. He was later convicted, in absentia, by reason of his "insanity", under Article 70.1 ("Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda") of the RSFSR Criminal Code. The official charge was the making and possession of photocopies of anti-Soviet literature, namely two copies of the banned work The New Class by Milovan Djilas. Bukovsky was examined by Soviet psychiatrists, declared to be mentally ill ("sluggish schizophrenia"), and sent for treatment at the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad where he remained for almost two years, until February 1965. It was there he became acquainted with General Petro Grigorenko, a fellow inmate.

In December 1965, Bukovsky helped prepare a demonstration on Pushkin Square in central Moscow to protest against the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. He circulated the "Civic Appeal" by mathematician and poet Alexander Esenin-Volpin, which called on the authorities to obey the Soviet laws requiring glasnost in the judicial process, e.g. the admission of the public and the media to any trial. The demonstration on 5 December 1965 (Constitution Day) became known as the Glasnost Meeting or rally, and marked the beginning of the openly active Soviet civil rights movement.

Bukovsky himself was unable to attend. Three days earlier he was arrested, charged with distributing the appeal, and kept in various psikhushkas, among them Hospital No 13 at Lublino, Stolbovaya and the Serbsky Institute, until July 1966.

Final arrest (1971) and imprisonment

Following the release of the documents, Bukovsky was denounced in Pravda as a "malicious hooligan, engaged in anti-Soviet activities" and arrested on 29 March 1971. At first held in Lefortovo Prison, in August, Bukovsky spent approximately three months in the Serbsky Institute, which this time pronounced him mentally sound and able to stand trial.

During the trial in January 1972 Bukovsky was accused of slandering Soviet psychiatry, contacts with foreign journalists, and the possession and distribution of samizdat. On this occasion he again used his final words to the court to reach a much wider audience when the text circulated in samizdat. He was sentenced to two years in prison, five in a labour camp, and five more in internal exile.

While in prison Bukovsky and his fellow inmate, the psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, wrote a brief 20-page Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, which was widely published abroad, in Russian (1975) and in many other languages, including English, French, Italian, German, and Danish. It instructed potential victims of political psychiatry how to behave during interrogation to avoid being diagnosed as mentally ill.

Deportation from the USSR (1976)

The fate of Bukovsky and other political prisoners in the Soviet Union had been repeatedly brought to world attention by Western diplomats and human rights groups such as the relatively new Amnesty International formed in 1961.

In December 1976, Bukovsky was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zürich airport by the Soviet government for the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalán. In his 1978 autobiography Bukovsky describes how he was brought to Switzerland in handcuffs. The widely publicised exchange increased public awareness in the West about Soviet dissidents. A fellow dissident, Vadim Delaunay wrote an epigram on the occasion about the exchange of "hooligan" Bukovsky:

In March 1977, US President Jimmy Carter met with Bukovsky at the White House. In the USSR the meeting was seen by dissidents and rights activists as a sign of the newly elected president's willingness to stress human rights in his foreign policy; the event provoked harsh criticism by Soviet leaders.

Bukovsky moved to Great Britain where he settled in Cambridge and resumed his studies in biology, disrupted fifteen years earlier (see above) by his expulsion from Moscow University.

Bukovsky gained a master's degree in Biology at Cambridge University. He also wrote and published To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (1978). (The title in Russian, And the Wind Returns ..., is a Biblical allusion.) The book was translated into English, French and German. It was published in Russian the following year by Chalidze publishers in New York. Today the Russian original is available online via a number of websites.

After he settled in the West, Bukovsky wrote many essays and polemical articles. These not only criticised the Soviet regime and, later, that of Vladimir Putin, but also exposed "Western gullibility" in the face of Soviet abuses and, in some cases, what he believed to be Western complicity in such crimes. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Bukovsky campaigned with some success for an official UK and US boycott of the summer 1980 Olympics in Moscow. During the same years he voiced concern about the activities and policies of the Western peace movements.

Return to the Soviet Union (1991)

In April 1991, Vladimir Bukovsky visited Moscow for the first time since his deportation fifteen years before.

In the run-up to the 1991 presidential election, Boris Yeltsin's campaign team included Bukovsky on their list of potential vice-presidential running-mates. In the end, army officer Alexander Rutskoy, a veteran of the 1979–1989 war in Afghanistan and Hero of the Soviet Union was selected. On 5 December 1991, both of Bukovsky's Soviet-era convictions were annulled by a decree of the RSFSR Supreme Court. The following year President Yeltsin formally restored Bukovsky's Russian citizenship: he had never been deprived of his Soviet citizenship, despite deportation from the country.

Post-Soviet period

British and European psychiatrists assessing the documents on psychiatric abuse released by Bukovsky characterised him in 1971: "The information we have about [Vladimir Bukovsky] suggests that he is the sort of person who might be embarrassing to authorities in any country because he seems unwilling to compromise for convenience and personal comfort, and believes in saying what he thinks in situations which he clearly knows could endanger him. But such people often have much to contribute, and deserve considerable respect."

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union Vladimir Bukovsky was again out of favour with the Russian authorities. He supported Yeltsin against the Supreme Soviet in the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis in October that year but criticised the new Constitution of Russia approved two months later, as being designed to ensure a continuation of Yeltsin's power. According to Bukovsky, Yeltsin became a hostage of the security agencies from 1994 onwards, and a restoration of KGB rule was inevitable.

Judgment in Moscow

In 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Yeltsin's government invited Bukovsky to serve as an expert witness at the trial before the Constitutional Court where Russia's communists were suing Yeltsin for banning their Party and taking its property. The respondent's case was that the CPSU itself had been an unconstitutional organisation. To prepare his testimony, Bukovsky requested and was granted access to a large number of documents from the CPSU Central Committee archives (then reorganised into the Central Depository for Contemporary Documentation or TsKhSD). With the help of a small hand-held scanner and a laptop computer, he managed secretly to make photocopies of many of the documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Central Committee. The copies were then smuggled to the West.

Bukovsky hoped that an international tribunal in Moscow might play a similar role to the first Nuremberg Trial (1945–1946) in post-Nazi Germany and help the country begin to overcome the legacy of Communism.

It took several years and a team of assistants to piece together the scanned fragments (many only half a page in width) of the hundreds of documents photocopied by Bukovsky and then, in 1999, to make them available online. Many of the same documents were extensively quoted and cited in Bukovsky's Judgment in Moscow (1995), where he described and analysed what he had uncovered about recent Soviet history and about the relations of the USSR and the CPSU with the West.

The book was soon translated into several languages but did not appear in English for over twenty years. Random House bought the rights to the manuscript, but the publisher, in Bukovsky's words, tried to make the author "rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective." Bukovsky resisted, explaining to the Random House editor that he was "allergic to political censorship" because of "certain peculiarities of my biography". (The contract was subsequently cancelled.). Meanwhile, the book was published in French as Jugement à Moscou (1995), in Russian (1996) and in certain other Slavic languages: for a time the Polish edition became a best-seller. In 2016, it was published in Italian, by Spirali, with the title Gli archivi segreti di Mosca. An English language translation did not appear in book form until May 2019, five months before the author died.

On 30 March 2011, Bukovsky requested the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev by the British authorities after submitting to Westminster Magistrates' Court materials on crimes against humanity that the former Soviet leader had allegedly committed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by ordering military suppression of demonstrations in Lithuania, Tbilisi, Baku and Tajikistan.

Potential 1996 presidential candidacy

In early 1996, a group of Moscow academics, journalists and intellectuals suggested that Vladimir Bukovsky should run for President of Russia as an alternative candidate to both incumbent President Boris Yeltsin and his main challenger Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. However, no formal nomination process was initiated.

Memento Gulag

In 2001, Bukovsky was elected President of the Comitatus pro Libertatibus – Comitati per le Libertà – Freedom Committees in Florence, an Italian libertarian organisation which promoted an annual Memento Gulag, or Memorial Day devoted to the Victims of Communism, on 7 November (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution). The Memento Gulag has since been held in Rome, Bucharest, Berlin, La Roche sur Yon and Paris.

Contacts with Boris Nemtsov and the Russian opposition

In 2002, Boris Nemtsov, former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia who was then an elected member of the State Duma and leader of the Union of Rightist Forces, paid a visit to Bukovsky in Cambridge. He wanted to discuss the strategy of the Russian opposition. It was imperative, Bukovsky told Nemtsov, that Russian liberals adopt an uncompromising stand toward what he saw as the authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin.

In January 2004, with Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir V. Kara-Murza and others, Bukovsky was a co-founder of Committee 2008. This umbrella organisation of the Russian democratic opposition was formed to ensure free and fair elections in 2008 when a successor to Vladimir Putin was elected.

In 2005, Bukovsky was among the prominent dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s (Gorbanevskaya, Sergei Kovalyov, Eduard Kuznetsov, Alexander Podrabinek, Yelena Bonner) who took part in a documentary series by Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. They Chose Freedom. In 2013 Bukovsky was featured in a documentary series by Natella Boltyanskaya Parallels, Events, People.

In 2009, Bukovsky joined the council of the new Solidarnost coalition which brought together a wide range of extra-parliamentary opposition forces.

Criticism of torture in Abu Ghraib prison

As revelations mounted about the sanctioned torture of captives in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Abu Ghraib and the CIA secret prisons, Bukovsky entered the discussion with an uncompromising attack on the official if covert rationalisation of torture. In an 18 December 2005 op-ed in The Washington Post, Bukovsky recounted his experience under torture in Lefortovo prison in 1971. Once commenced, he warned, the inertia of torture was difficult to control, corrupting those who carried it out. "Torture", he wrote, "has historically been an instrument of oppression—not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering." Bukovsky explained:

Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists.

US President Barack Obama repudiated the Torture Memos on 20 January 2009, two days after taking office.

Russian agents in the European Union

In EUSSR, a booklet written with Pavel Stroilov and published in 2004, Bukovsky exposed what he saw as the "Soviet roots of European Integration". Two years later, in an interview with The Brussels Journal, Bukovsky said he had read confidential documents from secret Soviet files in 1992 which confirmed the existence of a "conspiracy" to turn the European Union into a socialist organisation. The European Union was a "monster", he argued, and it must be destroyed, the sooner the better, "before it develops into a full-fledged totalitarian state". As an expression of his Eurosceptic position Bukovsky was vice-president of The Freedom Association (TFA) in the United Kingdom.

Ten years earlier, Bukovsky sketched some of the ways in which cooperation was secured. Beyond those who were recruited as Soviet agents and consciously worked for the USSR, as he explained in Judgment in Moscow (1995), there were men and women whom the KGB and GRU classified as "agents of influence" and "confidential contacts":

The majority of these "agents of influence", moreover, were not in a literal sense KGB agents. Some distributed Soviet disinformation for idealistic reasons; others were paying off an old "debt" to the KGB or, on the contrary, expected some new reward or service; others simply did not know what they were doing. ... The examples are endlessly varied.

This applied equally, Bukovsky cautioned, to post-Stalin generations of specialists on the USSR and Eastern Europe. They had been subjected to similar pressures and inducements in the 1970s and 1980s:

The majority of Sovietologists and Slavists, experts on Russia and the Soviet Union, were dependent on the regime for permission to visit the USSR from time to time. A specialist could not secure his place and reputation in the current academic world without that contact: anyone might accuse him of having lost touch and no longer retaining his expertise. The chance to travel to the USSR, however, was closely monitored in those years by the KGB.

2008 presidential candidacy

In May 2007, Bukovsky announced his plans to run as candidate for president in the May 2008 Russian presidential election. On 16 December 2007, Bukovsky was officially nominated to run against Dmitry Medvedev and other candidates.The group that nominated Bukovsky as a candidate included Yuri Ryzhov, Vladimir V. Kara-Murza, Alexander Podrabinek, Andrei Piontkovsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky and others. Activists, authors and commentators such as Viktor Shenderovich, Valeriya Novodvorskaya and Lev Rubinstein also favoured Bukovsky.

Responding to pro-Kremlin politicians and commentators who expressed doubt about Bukovsky's electoral prospects, his nominators rejected a number of frequently repeated allegations. In Moscow more than 800 citizens of the Russian Federation nominated Bukovsky for president on 16 December 2007. Bukovsky secured the required number of signatures to register and submitted his application to the Central Election Commission on time, 18 December 2007.

Bukovsky's candidacy received the support of Grigory Yavlinsky, who announced on 14 December 2007 at the Yabloko party conference that he would forgo a campaign of his own and would instead support Bukovsky.

On 22 December 2007, the Central Electoral Commission turned down Bukovsky's application, on the grounds that he had failed to give information about his activities as a writer when submitting his documents, that he was holding a British residence permit, and that he had not been living in Russia during the past ten years. Bukovsky appealed against the decision at the RF Supreme Court on 28 December 2007 and, subsequently, before its cassation board on 15 January 2008.

Conflict with Putin's regime

Bukovsky was among the first 34 signatories of "Putin must go", an online anti-Putin manifesto published on 10 March 2010. In May 2012, Vladimir Putin began his third term as president of the Russian Federation after serving four years as the country's prime minister. The following year, Bukovsky published a collection of interviews in Russia which described Putin and his team as The heirs of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's last and most notorious secret police chief.

In March 2014 Russia annexed Crimea after Ukraine had lost control of its government buildings, airports and military bases in Crimea to unmarked soldiers and local pro-Russian militias. The West responded with sanctions targeted at Putin's immediate entourage, and Bukovsky expressed the hope that this would prove the end of his regime.

In October 2014, the Russian authorities declined to issue Bukovsky with a new foreign-travel passport. The Russian Foreign Ministry stated that it could not confirm Bukovsky's citizenship. The response was met with surprise from the Presidential Human Rights Council and the Human Rights ombudsman of the Russian Federation.

On 17 March 2015, at the long-delayed inquiry into Alexander Litvinenko's fatal poisoning, Bukovsky gave his views as to why Litvinenko had been assassinated. Interviewed on BBC TV eight years before, Bukovsky expressed no doubt that the Russian authorities were responsible for the London death of Litvinenko on 23 November 2006.

Child pornography case

On October 28, 2014, Bukovsky was accused in the UK of the possession of child pornography. In April 2015, Bukovsky was charged with multiple counts of the production and possession of child pornography. Bukovsky pleaded not guilty to the charges. The prosecutor, Will Carter, said that Bukovsky admitted to possessing child abuse materials which he downloaded over the course of 15 years, and that he described the activity as a "hobby" and "research", comparing it to stamp collecting. According to him, Bukovsky told police that he did not harm anyone or commit any crime by looking at the images, and said the minors on the images "looked as if they had been enjoying themselves". Forensic examination of Bukovsky's hard drives revealed thousands of child abuse images and videos – some category A – featuring mostly boys and children of toddler age, court was told. His computer was examined by computer forensics expert Howard Chivers, associate professor at the University of York, who testified in court that the evidence supported the view that the material was installed on the computer by the user and not a third party, and that it was impossible for the user to not have been aware of its presence.

Bukovsky denied "making any indecent or prohibited photographs, pseudo-photographs or videos of children", claiming he was a victim of a smear campaign by Russian state security services, whose hackers had allegedly planted the images on his computer. He protested the charges with a hunger strike and sued the Crown Prosecution Service for libel. The Court of Appeals dismissed the libel claim. Due to several health complications and medical operations, his trials were delayed multiple times and were eventually halted indefinitely.

Bukovsky's conspiracy theory on the material being planted is supported by the American journalist Bill Gertz, who asserts that Bukovsky was targeted "in a Russian disinformation operation shortly before he was to testify before the Owen commission in March 2015. A Russian hacker broke into his laptop computer and planted child pornography photographs on the device. A Russian intelligence agent then tipped off the European Union law enforcement agency, Europol, to the photos... It was a classic Russian disinformation and influence operation."

Death

Bukovsky died of a heart attack on 27 October 2019 at the age of 76 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. He is buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.